ery
influence which you allow to pass through your mind colours it, but most
of all, those which appeal to your feelings. You take pains to strengthen
your minds, but you let your feelings come up as wheat or tares according
to chance; and yet the unruly wills and affections of women need more
discipline than their minds.

Perhaps the individual girl feels commonplace and of small account. Why
should she restrain her love of fun, her Tomboyism, her tendency to
flirtation? She is no heroine! But, let her be as commonplace as possible,
she will represent Woman to the man who is in love with her, as surely as
Beatrice represented it to Dante.

Every woman, married or single, alters the opinion of some man about
women. Even a careless man judges a girl in a way that she, with her head
full of nonsense, probably never dreams of;--he has a standard for her,
though he has none for himself.

It is small wonder that chivalrous devotion should decrease when women lay
so little claim to it. Miss Edgeworth needed to decry sentimental and
high-flown feelings,--the Miss Edgeworth of to-day would need to uphold
romance.

Women may still be "Queens of noble Nature's crowning," but they too
often find that crown irksome, and prefer to be hail-fellow-well-met,
taking and allowing liberties, which give small encouragement to men to be
like Susan Winstanley's lover.

Dante never watched the young man and maiden of to-day accosting each
other, or he would not have said--

"If she salutes him, all his being o'er
Flows humbleness."

I am afraid Dante would now be left "_sole_ sitting by the shores of old
Romance," unless indeed he went to some of the seniors, who are supposed
to have no feelings left! "If you want to marry a young heart, you must
look for it in an old body."

Are you, then, to reject all suggestions of a sensible marriage with any
man who is not Prince Perfect? I once read a very sensible little poem
which described the heroine waiting year after year for Prince Perfect. He
came at last, but unfortunately "he sought perfection too," so nothing
came of it! Cromwell's rule in choosing his Ironsides is the safest in
choosing a husband: "Give me a man that hath principle--I know where to
have him." If he comes to you disguised as one of these somewhat
commonplace Ironsides, and recommended by your mother, consider how very
much the fairy Prince of your dreams would have to put up with in you, and
you will proba